You always have to wonder about how true a “true” story is. Because often it’s not very much at all. Which is also why I’m not sure how this movie could be happening.

See, you can’t actually write a movie surrounding the mystery of the Christian Longo case. He killed his family, fled the country, and lived as “Michael Finkel.” Who just happened to be a disgraced former New York Times journalist. After his arrest, Longo agreed to be interviewed by Finckel believing it would help him get an acquittal. But after his conviction, he confessed to everything.

So there’s no suspense, right? No mystery? Why then would the trailer creators try to make the movie suspenseful? Or show Longo threatening Finkel’s girlfriend when he hasn’t left the jail since he was arrested?

Possibly because Finkel’s memoir of the same name is less about deciding if Longo committed the crime, and more about the psychologically destructive relationship the two men had. Specifically, the ways in which both Longo and Finkel had constructed stories, the ways that they came clean about those stories and the price of brutal honesty within a relationship. This could be a meta- commentary on how trailers inherently mislead viewers by editing the larger story. That in order to properly convey the message of a film, you’re required to manipulate the truth by removing details and obscuring the ending. They could be arguing that any time you attempt to tell the truth, you’re also lying because no one can tell the whole truth. Much in the same way that Finkel did in the story that lead to his downfall.

Or it could be that trailer creators or lazy. Either way.

Emily Chambers is a Staff Contributor for Pajiba. You can follow her retweeting other people on Twitter.